Lake Erie Lives

 

Pat Dailey has a great voice. It’s deep and gravelly, quiet, with a lingering air of mellowed gravitas. It’s a voice that’s heralded summer in the Lake Erie Islands for three decades. Last year, the veteran entertainer finally earned his keep.

 

“Reserved for Pat Dailey,” reads the plaque at the bar inside Hooligan’s, an Irish pub on South Bass Island. It’s no Grammy. But it’s a fitting tribute to Dailey, the guy who loves to have a good time.

“I just like to party and laugh and sing — it’s the Irish in me,” he says. “It comes natural to me, and I couldn’t believe over the years that I was actually tricking people into believing that I was a singer-songwriter.”

The 69-year-old musician spent more than 25 summers performing at Put-in-Bay’s Beer Barrel Saloon, and now he’s four years into a stint at the Boathouse. He occasionally travels elsewhere in the region, singing, but Put-in-Bay is his one true love, his muse, his soul.

“I equate Duvall Street in Key West, Bourbon Street in New Orleans and downtown Put-in-Bay on a weekend,” Dailey says. “I don’t know where else you can find those kind of intense settings, where there’s so much action in such a tight space.”

What he does know is that it’s all he’s ever wanted.

“When I’m surrounded by the craziness, I feel a certain feeling of peace,” Dailey muses of his time spent onstage, belting out island favorites and cracking jokes between songs. “I’m in familiar territory, and everyone around me is having so much fun.”

If this is the point in the story where you call him, as so many have, our own Jimmy Buffett, well, you’re right — and you’re wrong. Their music is nothing alike, says Dailey. Sure, they both write songs about the water, and drinking. But Dailey’s laid-back meditations on the pursuit of pleasure are more Gordon Lightfoot folk than Buffett fever.

Dailey was not born an islander — or anything close to it. He grew up landlocked in St. Louis. While his high school band mates moved on to college and marriage, Dailey hit the open road. Destination, San Francisco. Once there, he hitchhiked and rode the Greyhound until he saved up enough for the quintessential rambler vehicle: a Volkswagen bus. He split his time between singing in bars and pumping gas, pingponging between Chicago and the West Coast, until eventually the singing was enough. But it took a chance encounter in the Windy City to bring Dailey into our lives.

A guy at one of his Chicago shows encouraged him to come play at a bar he owned in Cleveland. “I’d never been that far east,” Dailey remembers. “I started coming back to Cleveland frequently, and every time I did, the people would all say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to go to Put-in-Bay. You would be perfect for that.’ ”

So, in the late ’70s, Dailey went to Put-in-Bay and wandered into the cavernous, empty Beer Barrel Saloon and thought, “I know how to fill a place like this.”

After a summer on the island, his trips back to the West Coast started to feel less fun. Eventually the trips came to a halt. These days, Dailey gets his island fix with Key West in the winter and his house on South Bass in the summer. He tools around Lake Erie in an old wooden Lyman boat, built on the shores of our Great Lake in 1962. He’s an honorary Ohioan, for all intents and purposes, who has found a home there, among the like-minded Put-in-Bay fanatics who swarm the place each summer.

“When people go to islands, they get a whole different feeling about their mood, their self-image,” he says with a deep, rolling laugh. “They let go of a whole lot of stuff and all of a sudden they become what they want to be, I guess, and have a lot of fun.”

The years come and go, but Dailey’s always there, leading the regulars in “Put-in-Bay,” the island anthem he presciently wrote after his first visit there, before he had any idea what his future would hold.